Social Media « Pixels from the Edge

Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Pop Your Facebook Profile Picture

I came across a cool article the other day which had some examples on how to go a little crazy with your Facebook profile picture, so I can’t take full credit for this. In fact I might not be able to take any credit at all, I just got done reading the article when my good friend (and awesome photographer) Doug was walking by, he had his full set of equipment with him that day and the next thing I knew I was hanging from the drywall down the hall with a flash on either side of me, I’m just glad I opted to wear underwear that day! He did his Photoshop thing and placed the photo over a Facebook profile background template, and added what I can only assume if what he perceives Twitter to think of me, he even added a splat of bird crap to my lid – nice! I uploaded it to my Facebook profile and I think it turned out great. The deal is basically that Facebook allows your profile picture to be up to 200 x 600 pixels and if you overlay it onto the background before uploading then you can make it seemingly interact with or come out of the page.

A few of things to keep in mind:

The position of the photo is dependent on how many lines your status message occupies. The image isn’t pushed down with the rest of the page content, so the more lines your status occupies the more of the upper gray needs to be added to the image. The majority of my status messages seem to take up two lines, so I have my image defaulted to that, and I also have a one line version uploaded to my profile pic album and could switch to that if I really wanted to.
The position of the photo is dependent on the text size of your status message, which is a similar issue to above, but actually a much bigger problem. This is to do with how the browser chooses to render that font, so it is a platform and browser problem. We have already noticed differences from Mac to Windows to Safari – each one was a pixel off even though we used Firefox to test on all three platforms. I currently have mine set to look good in Windows which covers the majority of web users, but of course the people that really care about pixel perfect positioning are all on Macs. We thought about getting creative to try and work around this and have the wall appear to tear, this might work out fairly nicely on a picture like mine where I’m hanging so it makes sense, but wouldn’t work for all cases.
The image doesn’t always appear over the exact background it’s been created to appear over. For example if you look at my public Facebook profile (make sure you are not logged in) it’s pushed way down, or if you look at my profile in the Facebook iPhone app it’s a similar deal. It’s not necessarily bad but something to keep in mind.
If you go with a long profile picture as I have then it will push down the content within the left column.
The thumbnail that accompanies your Facebook feed items is only 50 x 50 pixels so if you have a long picture it won’t all fit. I found that Facebook has quite a nice thumbnail feature that allows you to pick an area of a smaller version of your profile picture so you’ll probably find it works out quite well.

I conclude that it’s all a bit gimmicky now, at least for a personal profile page, it might work well for a fan page that doesn’t have to worry about a status message and the page looks the same whether you are logged in or not. If Facebook were to allow PNGs with transparency to be uploaded then it would solve the issue of not having to worry about where the background meets. But there would still be the issue of positioning, for example in my picture my hands hanging from the exact position of the background seem still wouldn’t be controlled. Facebook would need to allow for liquid positioning of the image – just as the rest of the page moves with the text then so should the image. And I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t allow for us to use a different image for the thumbnail than the one used for the profile picture. None of this is hard to do from a coding perspective, but I imagine Facebook is a lot more concerned with their branding, trying to stay away from the horrors of MySpace. One of the things I’ve always loved about Facebook over MySpace is exactly that – the clean organized look and feel, but c’mon Facebook give us the chance to somehow add just a little personality to our profile page!

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Tags: Branding, Facebook, Social Media, Web Design | 2 Comments »

Twitter v. Facebook – A Social Media Deathmatch

A long time ago I wrote a post that I’ve been meaning to counter for some time now but I just hadn’t known how to tackle it. But the other day I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who doesn’t use Twitter, and like just about everyone that doesn’t tweet he also thinks it’s kinda shit. He was saying stuff like “isn’t Twitter just the status message of Facebook?” (my second ever tweet!) and I was like “holy crap, I’m having a conversation with myself 8 months ago”, I was talking to the me that wrote that blog post. See I’ve come a long way since I started tweeting, a really long way, and I’d forgotten what the me like then was like, the thoughts that went through my head, so talking to him gave me the insight I needed to get this post written.

Twitter versus Facebook Status Message

This is important to explore, people need to understand this difference. Facebook is a social network whereas Twitter is a micro-blog. In a social network you interact with your pre-selected friends, in a blog you expose yourself to the entire world. I can’t explain it any more simpler than that. He ended up understanding Facebook as having your friends over for dinner whereas Twitter is like hanging out at a rave. I’d say that was pretty accurate regarding the dinner – it’s a closed occasion by invite only (and family members you don’t even like might come by and join in and there’s little you can do about it!), and spot on for the rave analogy and you can see a sideshow below to mirror this.

Still don’t understand why Twitter is different than Facebook Status

But he still didn’t get it. The thing is I happened to know from being friends with him on Facebook that he barely ever updates his status. And he doesn’t blog either. So if you don’t have a desire to talk to the masses then how can you get it? But look, Twitter isn’t just about micro-blogging, it’s also about micro-following…

Follow me, me no follow you

This I love about Twitter. See in Facebook if someone wants to be friends with you then you have to be friends back in order to be connected. And what ends up happening? Noise noise noise. You end up being friends with a shitload of people you don’t care to know about and they drown out everything that the people you are interested with hearing from are doing. But with Twitter someone can follow you and you don’t have to follow them back. This is super powerful.

Real-time Search

Even people that use Twitter don’t understand how powerful it is (so how can those who don’t stand a chance?). Twitter is pure information. Wow I love that so much I’ll say it again. Twitter is pure information. It’s what’s happening right now, and it’s searchable instantly in real-time. Forget TV news, news websites, newspapers, everything that happens these days is reported first on Twitter, instantly and unbiased (there’s very little room for bias in 140 characters, and there’s enough ‘reporters’ to allow to read between the lines of any bias that does come through), when the attacks in Mumbai happened we knew about it first via Twitter, we heard first on Twitter about the intimidation going on during the Afghanistan elections, and when Michael Jackson died no matter where you were or what you were doing, if you had a mobile device and you were on Twitter you knew about it that instant. I even remember during the big webcast for the iPhone OS 3.0 update we all went for lunch and used Twitter for news on the new features.

Hash Tag #help

This is pretty amazing. Twitter has many hidden gems most of which I won’t go into in this article, but something worth a mention is hash tags, and more specifically using them to help you solve a problem. If you are new to the iPhone and are wondering how to save a missed call to your contact list then tweet, or you want to know how to make rounded corners using CCS3. In both cases you would tweet your question with the #help tag, and add #iphone or #css respectively. The web is full of knowledgeable people that like nothing more than to let the world know this by answering your questions.

140 character limit is power

I hear this a lot from non Twitter users and those new to Twitter, wondering when the 140 character limit will be lifted, that’s when they’ll get into Twitter. I know where they’re coming from, I thought the same during my early days of Twitter, it’s seen as a hindrance by outsiders. But those who adopt also adapt and begin to realize how powerful it is. I already said how Twitter is pure information and that’s largely due to this fact, there’s no room to give your opinion when you’re reporting a fact, not space for chitchat when you’re relaying a message, and no squeezing gray between the black and white. When you get used to it you begin to realize how powerful the 140 character limit is, you appreciate how much you can say in 140 characters, and in return how much information you can learn from a handful of tweets.

Conclusion

Twitter is immensely powerful and equally as useful. Most of Twitters power actually lies in its API and the third party apps and services that are built around it, this is something I haven’t really touched on in this article as I looked just to explore the similarities it has with the Facebook status. It isn’t better or worse than Facebook, it’s a very different product built to accomplish a different goal, to fill a very different void. In fact a quote I’ve read before, and I apologize I don’t know who first said it so I choose to credit it to no one, sums it up nicely:

Facebook is for people I went to school with, LinkedIn is for people I’ve worked with, and Twitter is for people I want to know

The point is there’s a place and a need for both Twitter and Facebook.

And finally, below is a very nice deck put together by Iain Taite from Poke which sums up the Twitter party theory:

Monday, September 14th, 2009

Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter | 3 Comments »

TweetDeck iPhone app #fail

All the hype around the TweetDeck iPhone app lately has been kind of bugging me, and the last straw is this article I read yesterday, frankly it’s bothered me. It’s not up to me to decide what they think is a badass iPhone app, but they include TweetDeck in the list and the only thing they say about it is “obviously”. Obviously what exactly?

Ordinarily I wouldn’t even say anything, TweetDeck is free after all. Aesthetically it’s beautiful, and as an iPhone app in many ways it stands out as brilliant, taking advantage of the state-of-the-art technologies the iPhone offers, where as with other apps it can be apparent the developers haven’t quite been able to step away from traditional mobile app development and harness the power of the iPhone. But it’s not just an iPhone app, it’s actually a Twitter client, and in that I believe it severely fails.

Yes it has some sweet features – manage multiple accounts (I think it’s the only free iPhone Twitter client to offer this), create multiple views (this is very cool), group those you follow together, and synching with the desktop client. But I think it runs before it can walk, those features are way cool but it lacks the basics of what I need from a Twitter client. It doesn’t scroll down to your oldest new tweet, what’s the deal there? And the color difference between the new and old tweet state is barely visible to the naked eye. A designer friend who has the app didn’t even realize there are different color states, and this is a guy that can spot an off pixel on a screen from across the room and one floor up. The two colors are so the same it reminds me of that scene in American Psycho when they are all sitting around comparing how different their business cards are when they all appear to be the same off-white color. So I have to actually remember the last tweet I read? And even if I do remember I have to manually scroll down the 146 new tweets I’ve just recieved. And all this applies again and again for the multiple columns.

And another area where the app fails is its direct message interface. As far as I can tell it doesn’t even show your sent messages. What’s the thinking behind that? It should take lead from Twitterfon who does it perfectly and displays both sides of the conversation in speech bubbles with avatars just like an IM app.

I dunno why I’m choosing to be so negative about a free app, I guess that whole “obviously” thing really wound me up. The desktop version is definitely badass, and they’ve put a lot of work into their iPhone app so why have such serious usability issues? Maybe I don’t need a tool as powerful as TweetDeck on-the-go so I don’t appreciate it, I don’t have multiple twitter accounts and I don’t follow hundreds of tweeple so I can live without the grouping functionality away from my desk. Personally I just use Twitterfon, it might not be as beautiful but I think it’s badass, obviously.

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Tags: iPhone, Mobile Devices, Social Media, Twitter | 1 Comment »

Blog Relaunch

So I finally managed to find the time to relaunch this blog. When I first started the blog it was somewhat of an experiment so I didn’t spend much effort on its design, but unlike other failed blogs I’d started over the years I’ve really been enjoying writing these posts and I think this time around it’s got some staying power. This relaunch is really intertwined with my online rebrand I’ve been talking about lately, this blog plays a big part in my online image and it was important that I spend the time to focus on fixing its issues.

So the biggest areas I wanted to address were:

Domain Name

My old domain ‘blog.londonstreetlife.com’ had many things wrong with it, but mainly it was just too damn long. The hows and whys I picked this domain are obviously very closely related to my rebrand so I’ll talk about it in another post, but this new domain is half as long and I’m really liking how it looks in the browser address bar. In fact it’s so short i can pair it with my own URL shortener (instead of using bit.ly, for example) which will only help improve my online brand in the long run.

Switch from Blogger to Wordpress

For all the work I’ve been doing with Wordpress this past year and my subsequent posts on the subject, I’ve felt for a long time I really should be blogging on that platform. I have nothing against Blogger or any similar web tool, it’s been great to me and I don’t see the need to host the blog myself as long as it provides me with everything I need and doesn’t limit me in any way. However I have really been feeling the strain lately with Blogger, too many missing features, SEO failings, and little tweaks I am not able to make. Now I’m on Wordpress and am my own host and I can really go to town with this thing! Like a kid in a candy store I’m having a lot of fun practicing what I have been preaching and I even built my own plugin which I will be cleaning up and making publicly available soon.

Design

The new design is the most prevolent update as it really changes the whole feel of the blog. Whilst the switch from Blogger to Wordpress could be completely transparent to the user, and the domain name change might not even be noticed by a user coming in via a shortened link, there’s definitely no escape from noticing the redesign. I don’t want to get too into the color scheme I’ve gone with as it’s part of my brand color palette that I’ve been developing over the last month, and again I’ll be talking about that in another post. It’s not yet the finished product I’m sure, I’ll tweak as I go, but time is short for me these days and I’ve found that eventually there comes a point where I just have to pull the trigger or I’ll never get anything done. It is worth mentioning that whilst I do prefer dark text on a light background for readability purposes I really wanted to bring forth more of my personality into the design, so my words don’t just represent me, but also just by being here you already know a little bit of who I am. I’m really happy with the color scheme, it is totally me, and it works really well for my portfolio site (in development) where impression is as important as content, but for here where content is king I might find along the way that the sacrifice in readability is too great for a blog and switch it up and around a bit, make it a little easier on the eyes. I dunno, what do you think? It’s really up to you guys!

It’s worth taking a moment to talk about my old design and how in a way it was sort of an anti-design, I’m not referring to the art movement but the fact that it was meant to look like I hadn’t spent a lot of time designing it (cos I hadn’t). But also when I first started the blog I didn’t know where it was going to go or if it would even last so I really needed it to develop a personality before I could style it. So for old times sake, one last time and forever remembered here, RIP old blog:

Blog Title

And finally the blog title, I’ve been seeing some of my posts come up in Stumble Upon and they’ve been coming across kind of silly – Blogger published the blog name first and then the post title and I couldn’t figure out a way to reverse this setting, so every post of mine that made it into Stumble Upon just said my crap blog name and didn’t give a clue as to what the article was even about. That’s when I really started to realize that if I want the web to take my blog seriously then I’d better do it first myself. Before the the title was just ‘my name the blog’, as in ‘londonstreetlife the blog’, which basically ran along the same idea as my anti-design concept above, and again I didn’t know where it was gonna go or how long it would last so I didn’t spend the time thinking up a cool name, and in the end it never eally had one. The new name ‘Pixels from the Edge’ I think works really well, it kind of means a lot of things at once and they all apply. I wanted the name to reflect the creative-technology hybrid thing I got going on and is mainly what I talk about in this blog, and I think it does that very nicely. My lovely wife helped me come up with the name, so mad props to her! And the more I think about it the happier I am with it.

So what do you think folks, turned out any good?

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Tags: Branding, CMS, Social Media, Web Design, WordPress | No Comments »

Will the real Augmented Reality please stand up?

People we gotta come up with a new name for augmented reality. That’s the real next big thing and it’s waaaay dope but it’s name has been hijacked by a flash technology called Papervision3D which has nothing more going for it than a first encounter gimmick factor (I’m not ripping on the papervision technology itself, just when it is used to implement AR). It’s not like I didn’t also fall pray to the sweet song of the papervision sirens myself during my odyssey towards a new digital reality. But papervision is wicked, tricksy, false. Because of it I feel like I’m already sick of AR and it doesn’t even really exist yet, at least it only exists in my mind and in cool video demos out on the web. But listen up folks that technology is not AR. The real augmented reality is mixing the digital realm with the real world, digitally enhancing what we see, and it’s seriously rad. Think back to the original Terminator movie when you’d see the world through Arnie’s eyes as he’s scanning the room and all kinds of information is digitally overlaid – he’d look at someone and a panel would appear next to them with information on height, weight, threat level, etc. – y’know the kinds of things a terminator needs to know.

Here’s what I’m talking about. The following video has been going around recently and is quite interesting:

It’s mixing AR with Twitter. It’s a sweet concept and as Twitter already geotags your tweets you’d think those tweets would appear digitally in the same spot where they were published. But it doesn’t necessarily seem to working that way, there’s no sound so I can’t figure out what’s really going on, but it appears that ghosts are tweeting from halfway up trees? Not to worry though it’s the thought that counts, just think about sitting in a bar and looking across the room and seeing the crowds tweets in speech bubbles above their heads. Neat huh?

I came across this guy earlier this week and he’s been giving me inspiration:

It’s Mr super sneaky invisible stealth dude. And I really like the fact that his art is analogue and yet it’s helped me to trigger a digital concept. It’s basically to combine the above AR Twitter app with TwitPic. So you’re walking through London and you see before you a huge collage of photos perfectly placed in their exact locations, sometimes even overlapping, the compass and gyroscope in our mobile devices enables the photo to appear in its exact location, angle, and dimensions. And with a city that big it probably wouldn’t be long until everything you see before you has completely become the alternative reality created by the Twittersphere, maybe transparently overlaying the actual reality. Yeah it’s kind of a cool idea but it’s a bit messy. But what happens if we throw in an extra dimension, that of time, the time of day to be exact? Now the photo will only appear at the exact time of the day it was taken, hang around for a few moments, then disappear. Imagine it, you stand there and watch a busy London street, Leicester Square even, and as you do photos fade in for a moment then vanish, hundreds of photos come and go every second, the ghosts of days and years long past are alive again for a brief moment every new day, forever changing our perception of reality and the very idea of space and time. Trippy.

Actually thinking about it this is probably something else I came across recently that greatly contributed to the inspiration for this idea.

So c’mon folks help me out, we gotta come up with a new name for this technology as the current term has already been killed by inferior technologies falsely claiming to be it. Maybe like ‘Super Vision’ or something, anything that’s different. Let’s just come up with a new name already so we can talk about it without throwing up in our mouths a little, so we can be really excited about this technology again.

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Tags: Augmented Reality, iPhone, Mobile Devices, Social Media, Twitter | No Comments »

De-Branding Myself

So here I am, I’m 32 years old and I’ve been on the web forever, shit before the web even really existed I was gophering German university FTP servers for pictures of Claudia Schiffer. And what do I have to show for myself now, for all my years of online service? Who the hell am I online? londonstreetlife? Really??? Now that I can finally see it for what it is, it really is all kinds of lame. A buddy of mine got an iPhone last year and my phone broke so he lent me his old phone, he was all about keeping that sweet sony walkman phone in good condition incase he ever needed it again, which included leaving it in some orange case to keep it safe, I thought it was ugly but I was like whatever, I needed a phone. Then one day at the bar he sees me with the phone in the case and all he can say is ‘I never realized how much of a fool I looked going around with that phone!’ And that’s just about where I’m at right now, I’ve seen myself in the mirror carrying that lame ass phone in that ugly ass case, except it’s not a phone it’s my online brand, and it’s way lamer than that phone in that case ever was.

Lame-ass phone in ugly-ass case

I am a Techie

In fairness to myself there is a history behind “londonstreetlife”. See originally I was just a kid screwing around online, flaming and win-nuking in the chat rooms, and I fancied myself as a bit of a hacker dabbling in some buffer overloading and shit. And at the time I was just “streetlife”, and as a nick back then it worked, everyone had handles like that. And to be honest I think I could still work with that name if I’d managed to hang onto it, shit streetlife alone would be way dope. But back then it was like $70 to buy a domain name and I didn’t even have money to get myself a snack, and that $70 was a reoccurring annual fee, and besides no one back then was thinking to buy their own friggin TLD. And as the years went by streetlife.com was snapped up, but I didn’t care I just threw a “london” on the front, that was cool I was living in Spain and that was a throwback to the streets where I was from. And it seemed to work and I just went with it, and I didn’t think about it again…

I am a Creative

But over the last year or so I’ve taken a journey to embracing my creative side. Really I always had my foot in the creative door but my mind was firmly stuck in the techie room. It took a lot of self reflection on my part to get here, and it wasn’t easy, but thanks to the respect and support of some great creative leadership at my agency, believing in my creative talents, I’ve finally landed. For a while there I was extremely confused, I didn’t know where I was at. I was promoted to ACTD (Associate Creative Technology Director) at work, and suddenly I felt somewhat ostracized from the Technology department but yet I didn’t feel like I was part of the Creative department either. It didn’t help that I now reported to both departments, and I ended up feeling like I didn’t belong to either, marooned somewhere in between. I saw the movie Tropic Thunder and there’s a line where Robert Downey Jr’s character says “I’m the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude”, and at first I laughed cos it’s funny but then I realized that was sort of how I would describe myself and it was kind of depressing. But I ended up understanding that I am creative, and I am also technology, and the fact that I found myself so lost in identity was more the fault of the agency and the industry. See the future of web development is the merging of both those departments, and the agency has taken a great step towards reaching that goal by creating the first cross-over role, and it is now up to me to prove it works and let the rest of the agency catch up.

A dude playing a dude disguised as another dude

I am a Brand

So now that I finally embraced myself as a creative it was apparent that my brand wasn’t working, or even that I barely had one. See a techie is in the background, it doesn’t matter what your brand is, you don’t really get to have one. When you’re interviewing for a tech job none of it matters, they care about your expertise, coding skills, your work ethic and your ability to hit deadlines. None of that can be captured in a brand or a portfolio, therefore you have to produce code samples and references to look good and get hired. But when you’re a creative it’s entirely the opposite. A creative is in the spotlight, a creative represents the agency and the clients brand, a creative’s name goes on the awards and is talked about in the press releases. So if you aren’t able to brand yourself well then how can an agency trust you with a clients brand? If you don’t even know yourself well enough to define your own creative brief then how can you be be capable of capturing the essence of your clients? And if you don’t have the skill set or the drive to effectively execute and produce results when it comes to your own brand then how can you expect an agency to put their clients image in your hands?

But what brand am I?

So I’ve tasked myself with the challenge, and the project “my brand” is well under way, I’m energized and more excited about this than I have been about any project in a long time. Shit finally I get to find out who I am. Coming soon to a browser near you. Summer 2009. Watch this space!

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Tags: Best Business Practices, Branding, Digital Advertising, Social Media, Web Design | 4 Comments »

Video Slideshows With Animoto

Researching for a client recently I came across a neat little service called Animoto. The problem we had was needing a photo gallery that lives on a single page. Not a huge problem in itself and any of these would work, or numerous others I’ve worked with or built over the years. But the issue here is the CMS we have to work with doesn’t have the ability to upload media, this has to be done separately via FTP, so it’s a messy process and not ideal to leave in the hands of the account team. So I figured the best option would be to find some third party service that we could embed, the files would live on a remote host and eliminate the need to upload files to our server. So naturally I thought Flash would be a good fit for this and pretty quickly found myself at Animoto.

Dubbed “The end of slideshows” Animoto is a very tidy web application that instantly creates fun little video slideshows of a photo gallery. It is very clean and easy-to-use, comprising of two simple steps – upload images and pick a background song (you can pick from a simple selection of provided songs or upload your own), and a then just wait out a few minutes of rendering time. Within minutes I’d created a neat little video slideshow of my boy, shown above. It’s free to create a short 30 second video (12-15 photos recommended), and $3 to create a full length video or $30 for an unlimited amount for a full year and for $5 per video you can download it DVD quality. There’s also a professional license for $249 per year which gives you everything included at no extra charge as well as allowing a call-to-action button, white labeling the video, free commercially licensed music, and of course all the videos you make are approved for commercial use.

And once you’ve created the video it’s available to post to any social media (using Clearspring) or embed in your blog. And you can create a remix, which can be a one-click automatic process, or you can edit the remix – revolving images, adding text, spotlighting, as well as adding or deleting images. This is the one-click remix I made of the above video:

It wasn’t the ideal product for us to use for this particular project, but I was very impressed with the concept and the execution and it’s something I will be keeping in mind for the future. For personal use I think I could have a lot of fun with it – converting family photo albums, and work party or street barbecue photo mashups, and the fact it comes as an iPhone app and I can instantly create the videos from my photo reel on-the-go, as well I have all the ones I’ve previously created with me at all times, is pretty awesome.

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Tags: Flash, iPhone, New Dad, Social Media, Web 2.0, Web Apps | No Comments »